In her response to Ackbar Abbas's lecture, Ashleigh Harris brilliantly evokes underlying themes of destruction in Rem Koolhaas's architecture, and attempts to reinsert crticism into demonstration through a play on the etymology of 'sellotape'.
Ackbar Abbas begins his illustration of
Rem Koolhaas’s notion of Junk Space (see ‘Junkspace’, Obsolescence Vol. 100, Spring, 2002, pp 175-90) via a discussion of
the above building, the CCTV (Chinese Central Television) Building in Beijing.
The building is designed by Koolhaas, in collaboration with Ola Scheeren. The
architectural sketch above captures some of the urban exhilaration that Abbas
speaks of, emerging from the ‘man made experience which allows people to live
inside fantasy and not be apologetic about it’. He states that ‘cities don’t
need character, because the action is taking place in cyberspace’ – and what
better building to illustrate this point than the Chinese Central Television
building, an architectural monument to the importance of fantasy and the
cyber-lives that the building itself is a portal to.
For participants of the JWTC, the
building may have evoked Jane Guyer’s discussion of the Möbius strip,
in her elaboration of confusion as a form. After Guyer’s address, Ackbar Abbas
made an insightful point: in explaining the logic of the Möbius strip, he
reminded us that the confusion evoked by the Möbius form lies in its
dimensional shift from the second to the third dimension. It cannot exist in
two-dimensional space. It is in that transposition of dimensions in which
confusion arises. In the case of the CCTV building, the design cannot itself
traverse the materiality of its construction (or the laws of gravity) that
would allow it to become truly möbian. Yet, as Abbas points out, the aesthetics
of the building is surrealistic; where bricks, glass and mortar fail to produce
a true möbius, the building’s grandiose contortion around its vacant core
nevertheless evokes a sense, in the eye of the onlooker, of the distortion of
those materialities, of the gravitational impossibility of the building’s
massive overhang.
It is the television and media work framed
by and framing the building that opens another dimensionality in this design,
and it is here that the building achieves its true Möbius aesthetic. The
surface of the real undergoes a dimensional shift as it segues into the life
and work in and of the building. Yet, there is a second möbian dimensionality
to the building. We are reminded (and Abbas occasionally prompts us to recall)
Walter Benjamin’s notion of ruin: “In the ruins of great buildings, the idea of the plan speaks
more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well preserved they are;
and for this reason the German Trauerspiel merits interpretation. In the spirit
of allegory it is conceived from the
outset as a ruin, a fragment. Others may shine resplendently as on the
first day; this form preserves the image of beauty to the very last.”
(Benjamin, Walter The Origins of German
Tragic Drama, Transl. John Osborne, Introduced by George Steiner. Verso
1998: 235. Emphasis mine).
The
resplendent shine of the virtual architectural sketch is echoed in the almost
Cathedral-like vertical aspiration of the building under construction; the
cranes reaching even higher than the construction itself, as though in an
attitude of rapture. Note, at this stage the second building under construction
in the background: as part of the CCTV’s construction, this origami-like structure
(a hotel, as it happens, the ultimate site of life in junk space?) seems to
fold awkwardly under the sheer magnitude of its sister building.
Keeping Benjamin’s ruins in mind, (and also
Ato Quayson’s observation on Tuesday morning, in his talk ‘Urban Theory and Performative Streetscapes: Oxford
Street, Accra’ that city spaces are produced relatively), it is worth noting
that in February 2009, CCTV hosted a firework display that set fire to
the (as yet unfinished) hotel, turning it into a ruin before it was completed.
The above image is reminiscent not only of
the countless destruction scenes we have seen in films such as The Dark Knight Returns, (is Beijing
replacing New York as the archetype of Gotham city?), but also of Slavoj Žižek’s analysis in ‘Welcome
to the desert of the real’ (see http://lacan.com/reflections.htm).
He writes:
It
is precisely now, when we are dealing with the raw Real of a catastrophe, that
we should bear in mind the ideological and fantasmatic coordinates which
determine its perception. If there is any symbolism in the collapse of the WTC
towers, it is not so much the old-fashioned notion of the "center of
financial capitalism," but, rather, the notion that the two WTC towers
stood for the center of the VIRTUAL capitalism, of financial speculations
disconnected from the sphere of material production. The shattering impact of
the bombings can only be accounted for only against the background of the
borderline which today separates the digitalized First World from the Third
World "desert of the Real." It is the awareness that we live in an
insulated artificial universe which generates the notion that some ominous
agent is threatening us all the time with total destruction.
The catastrophe of ruin in the unfinished
building: the ruin is always already here: a mobiüs surface twisting together
the times and spaces of construction and destruction, forming and deforming, a
creation and a ruin. In the above image the structure of the burnt out hotel
appears precariously balanced on the fold that runs in an oblique line across
the building, suggesting immanent collapse, suggesting the frailty of paper. (I
recall Josh Comaroff’s statement about the short life-spans of buildings and
wonder if in Junkspace the life-span of the building is over before it is
built?)
This
relates to what Abbas calls the monstrous life of urban forms; not the
monstrosity of the ruin, but the catastrophe already written into the virtually
composed image of the architectural sketch, the catastrophe that is the generic
city. As Žižek’s reminds
us “the question
we should have asked ourselves when we stared at the TV screens on September 11
is simply: WHERE DID WE ALREADY SEE THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER AGAIN?”
(Original emphasis). It is this return of the ruin before the completion of the
building, that evokes the möbian contours of these two building’s awkward dance
of construction and destruction.
The
möbius strip denies us the comfort of theoretical understandings of the seam or
the stitch (see, for example, Leon de Kock’s theorisation of the seam in ‘South
Africa in the Global Imaginary: an introduction’ Poetics today 22: 2, 2001: 263-298). Yet, it is here that we hit up
against a formal problem: where do we
draw the line of distinction between what Abbas calls ‘demonstration’ and
‘critique’? The möbius logic of Koolhaas’s paper ‘Junkspace’ demonstratively
insists in its very form and style that theory is awkwardly poised
behind the life of the city, unable to get critical purchase on the speed with
which it reformulates itself and the lives within it. Thus, critique is engulfed
by demonstration. In the Junkspace of modern life, where we have gorged
ourselves to capacity on filling every orifice, every space, with the junk and
excess offered by the generic city, we end up melancholic and without political
and critical purchase.
This is
possibly why, for Abbas, “Manifestos are always wrong”. Yet he
(melancholically?) returns to them for his own critical purchase: in his
lecture he refers to his own Manifesto, written with David Theo Goldberg, on
Poor theory;
Lars Von Trier’s ‘Dogma 95 manifesto’ and ‘Vow of Chastity’; by implication André
Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto of 1924. He raises these manifestos only to
dismiss them: Von Trier ‘breaks almost every rule of his own vows of chastity’;
Urban change outpaces urban theory, including poor theory; the city, Abbas
claims, is invisible to urban theory. As Abbas fell back on Breton’s
fascination with Lautréamont’s
aesthetic of the incommensurability (what Breton saw as convulsive art) in the
poet’s famous quip about the beauty in “the chance encounter of a sewing machine
and an umbrella on an operating
table,” I wondered: are we caught in a return to the paradox of politics within
surrealism, where incommensurability inevitably devours the aims and politics
of critique? Convulsive beauty, incommensurability,
as drawn up in Breton’s manifestos of surrealism must also, surely, have had
their ruin, their ‘wrongness’ written into them from the outset.
But, if
manifestos are always wrong, we are caught in the inevitable twist (a mobiüs
twist, perhaps) of vainly attempting to politicise that which we ruin before it
is constructed: theory itself. Koolhaas’s lucid display of how theory is undone
in its attempt to capture the complexities of junkspace, turns into
‘demonstration’ rather than ‘critique’. Abbas insists that Von Trier’s films,
too, demonstrate rather than offer critique. In the discussion following
Abbas’s lecture, Helena Chavez MacGregor reminded us of the ambiguity of the
term ‘demonstration’: the word operates as both resistance and illustration.
But perhaps the political potential of the term is diffused (confused even) in
Koolhas’s written style and in Von Trier’s articulation of space and affect: a
confusion perhaps best articulated in Von Trier’s infamous, highly confused,
Nazi-sympathy statement (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LayW8aq4GLw).
If we do
not actively produce critical purchase on the demonstration of the world
(demonstrate against the world, not just demonstrate it), we risk a möbian confusion
wherein every form of representation stands only in mimetic relation to the
world. When I read Koolhaas’s paper (manifesto?) on Junkspace, the absence of
the critics accountability looms large in the contortions of the paper’s style:
much like the empty space carved out by the CCTV building, framing the ruins of
an unfinished hotel.
***
Sellotape [ˈsɛləˌteɪp] n. The
proprietary name of a cellulose or plastic self-adhesive tape, freq.
dispensed from reels for domestic use. Also gen.
sellotape v. trans. to fasten with
Sellotape.
sellotaped adj.
sellotaping n.
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Sellotape
is a proprietary noun, a word that evokes a late capitalist production of
language, the junkification (if you will) of language itself (the product is
made of cellophane, the spelling was changed to create the proprietary noun).
The product is a weak connector, taping together only paper (it is too weak for
other forms cohesion) and only for a short amount of time (the yellowed, frayed
edges of old tape, gone brittle, declares the tapes loss of its adhesive). It
has its own ruin built into it. Sellotape is useless material in and of itself,
its use emerges in relation to other objects. It is easily made waste, it creates
waste. It is leaves no seam, because it does not convincingly join substances
together, it merely places them next to or on top of one another. It is an
inappropriate material to think of alongside architecture, and the internet
(though the structure of blogging reminds us of the notice boards of old, with
torn and messy messages taped onto the ever shifting landscape of the board. The
notice board must be cleared to make space, the junk is removed, whereas the
junk of blogs remain as the virtual space expands to make room for new notes,
messages, discarded information). Sellotape is invented post-second world war.
It is anachronistic. It nostalgically returns us to the montage, the scrapbook,
the collage: it is a substance from postmodernism’s kindergarten. It has no
place in the era of 3D printers and drone warfare. Yet it is precisely because
of its cheap, trashy, old-fashioned, materiality that I bring it into this blog
(a nod to the material trace, perhaps): In a digitised world, materiality is
more tenuous than digital cutting and pasting. I open a document from 2007 and
cut and paste and print a section of it today, while the sellotape holding a
postcard to my notice board in my office, frays and peels away from the board.
If we ‘trope’ the word, allowing it to enter a critical frame of reference, it
is these properties that I am trying to capture: I wish to tape criticism back
onto demonstration. It is a tentative (and somewhat old fashioned) gesture. It
will fall apart in some near future. It will be subsumed within much grander
swathes of digitised information. But I allow myself this tentative act of
connecting, because it refuses the dimensional shift that the möbius turns into
confusion. It is hopelessly, and unapologetically, two-dimensional. It asks us
to read demonstration and critique in the same dimension.
What
better way to illustrate this than to look at what art can do with the poor
materiality of Sellotape. I leave the blog with this ‘Tape Installation’,
created with over 45km of tape, by the Croatian design collective foruse/numen, at
Tempelhof Airport, Berlin 2010. (All images available on http://www.designboom.com/design/dmy-2010-award-winner-forusenumen/).
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| Source:designboom |
(Webbed,
organic, transparent, smooth)
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| Source:designboom |
(Uterine,
sensual, alien, frail, membrane)
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| Source: designboom |
(Constructed,
alienating, shadowed, light, celluloid)
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| Source:designboom |
(Cathedral,
sacred, womb, stomach, cave, ocean, air, melancholy)
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| Source:designboom |
(Adhesive.
Empty. Junk. Space.)
Ashleigh Harris is senior lecturer in English at
Uppsala University, Sweden.
